Enter
“surge” that Gates and McChrystal backed. To Biden’s reckoning, a
counterterrorism approach would
be less costly, incur fewer military
casualties, allow for a lighter military footprint in Afghanistan and a
shift to the challenges of Pakistan,
while still demonstrating that the
United States was resolved to fight
extremists in Afghanistan.
As Arianna Huffington recounted, in October 2009, Biden was
hardly alone in his view, and support for his position transcended
mere ideology. The head of the
Council on Foreign Relations, Richard Haas, opined, “If Afghanistan
were a war of necessity, it would
justify any level of effort ... It is
not and does not. It is not certain
that doing more will achieve more.
And no one should forget that doing more in Afghanistan lessens
our ability to act elsewhere.” And
documentarian Robert Greenwald
urged, “The more we fight in Afghanistan, the more the conflict
is pushed across the border into
Pakistan, the more we destabilize
Pakistan, the more likely it is that
a fundamentalist government will
take over the army — and we’ll
have Al-Qaeda like groups with
nuclear weapons.”
As Foreign Policy’s Michael Had-
LOOKING FORWARD
IN ANGST
HUFFINGTON
01.19.14
dick noted, by October 2010, the
Obama administration had begun
inching in the direction of Biden’s
original strategy. And Obama’s own
fortunes were boosted immeasurably when he accomplished what is
arguably the highlight of his career
as commander-in-chief — the killing of Osama bin Laden. After all,
bin Laden was found to be sheltering in Pakistan.
And beyond these anecdotes and
Biden was correct in the
assessment that Pakistan was
becoming a dangerous center
of al Qaeda’s radicalism,
compared with Afghanistan.”
historical events, there is actual
data suggesting that Biden was
right to question the efficacy of the
counterinsurgency strategy, and
as fortune would have it, it’s now
published, courtesy of Jason Lyall
and The Washington Post’s political science blog, “The Monkey
Cage.”
In 2010 and 2011, Lyall, along
with Graeme Blair and Kosuke
Imai, undertook an “endorsement
experiment” survey of “3,000 Afghan males in 204 villages in five